Stress Hygiene by Jędrzej Bieńko, Kinga Dobosz, Agata Popik, Amelia Woroszył, curated by Katarzyna Piskorz, at Przeciąg Gallery, Warsaw, 11/04/2025 – 16/05/2025.
Exhibition Text:
It started innocently enough. Daily life was training our nerves, and we were running on fumes, of energy and psychological endurance. We processed stimuli while inhaling 10,000 liters of air a day, as nerve impulses rushed through us at 350 km/h.
Then the world trembled with a faint pulse—yet the tension hadn’t yet ignited our muscles, and breath was still uncounted. Until came the clenched jaw, the inability to take a full breath, micro-shaking hands, sweating, a twitching nerve in the eye. Hysteria? Or perhaps simply a systemic overload? Artists don’t waste their pain, they examine ways of existing within a reality of overstimulation, controlled productivity, and unspoken anxiety, essentially in the face of everything. Stress Hygiene is a story about survival strategies in a world of chronic tension. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”*, especially in a reality that leaves no space to breathe.
Stress Hygiene not only diagnoses the overload, but subtly points to strategies that escape the logic of the system: withdrawal, tenderness, attentiveness. Sleep, relinquishing excess, turning inward, this is not escapism, but resistance in its purest, if least spectacular, form. *Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: and Other Essays, Ixia Press, New York, 2017, p. 130. First published in 1988.
